Eugene O'neill and Sam Shepard Henry I. Schvey
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SPRING 1991 49 The Master and His Double: Eugene O'Neill and Sam Shepard Henry I. Schvey The very notion of linking Eugene O'Neill and Sam Shepard will seem ludicrous to some. Aside from the fact that Shepard may yet become as dominant a figure in the contemporary American theatre as O'Neill was in his day, there might seem no reason at all to suggest a comparison between the haunted father of American drama, with his belief in a fundamentally tragic vision of man derived at least in part from such European masters as Freud, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Strindberg; and Shepard, the apparently self-engendered cowboy of the American stage, part movie star and part jazz musician, whose early works owe more to the '60s drug culture, rock music and the "transform ation" techniques developed at Joseph Chaikin's experimental and highly influential Open Theatre in New York than to any concern with literary tradition, whether American or European. After all, it was Shepard himself who declared: "I don't want to be a playwright, I want to be a rock and roll star. ... I got into writing plays because I had nothing else to do"1 and that "Writing is neat because you do it on a very physical level. Just like rock and roll."2 But there has been a gradual change in the way Shepard has approached the craft of writing. And this change is particularly evident in his family plays beginning with Curse of the Starving Class (1978), Buried Child (1979), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1982), and.4 Lie of the Mind (1985). This shift in Shepard's attitude toward his writing is, paradoxically, revealed in a comment he made in Rolling Stone magazine regarding a proposed musical collaboration with Bob Dylan: He's [Dylan's] a lot of fun to work with, because he's so off the wall sometimes. We'd come up with a line, and I'd think that we were Henry I. Schvey is Professor of Drama and Chair of the Performing Arts Department at Washington University in St. Louis. The author of Oskar Kokoschka: The Painter as Playwright and co-editor of American Drama: New Essays, he has published extensively in the areas of contemporary British and American drama. 50 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism heading down one trail over here, and then suddenly he'd just throw in this other line, and we'd wind up following it off in some different direction. Sometimes it's frustrating to do that when you're trying to make a wholeness out of something. .3 (italics mine) The new Shepard is indeed "trying to make a wholeness out of something" and this explains the greater control, power, and perhaps even the apparent realism of these plays. One cause of the changes in Shepard's later style may be the fact that he has allowed himself to read and think more self-consciously about drama. As he said, . when I was living in New York City ... I avoided reading out of arrogance, really. But when I went to England in the early Seventies, I suddenly found myself having a kind of dry spell. It was difficult for me to write, so I started to read. And I read most of the Greek guys-Aeschylus, Sophocles ... I studied up on those guys, and I'm glad I did. I was just amazed by the simplicity of the ancient Greek plays, for instance-they were dead simple. Nothing complex or tricky. which surprised the hell out of me, because I'd assumed they were beyond me. But now I began to comprehend what they were talking about, and they turned out to be accessible.4 What the Greeks offered Shepard, I believe, was in part the same thing they offered Eugene O'Neill in works like Desire Under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra—a. confirmation of his own view of a world in which human destiny is shaped to a considerable extent by forces outside ourselves: As Shepard put it in a note to the British version of the science fiction-like fantasy The Unseen Hand; "Everybody's caught up in a fractured world they can't even see. What's happening to them is unfathomable but they have a suspicion. Something unseen is working on them. Using them. They have no power all the time they believe they're controlling the situation."5 For O'Neill, the "unseen hand" is the past which is the present and future too. As Mary Tyrone says in Long Day's Journey Into Night, we "all try to He out of that but life won't let us."6 For both O'Neill and Shepard since 1978, the "unseen hand" which "squeezes down and forces our minds to contract"7 is exerted by the family, and it is no accident that the greatest plays of both dramatists have been family plays which have been largely autobiographical in nature: Travis Bogard, in his study of O'Neill, Contour in Time, argues that "O'Neill used the stage as his mirror, and the sum of his work comprises an autobiography,"8 while in her examination of the playwright, Virginia Floyd asserts that "O'Neill had one tale to tell in his work: his own tortured, convoluted life story. His relationship to his mother, father, brother, wives, children and friends is dramatized in endless variations in the canon."9 Thus, it should not surprise us that Louis Sheaffer SPRING 1991 51 terms the autobiographical masterpiece Long Day's Journey into Night the play with the longest gestation period of any of his works; it was the play he, unconsciously, was aching to write when he first turned playwright in 1912. What Long Day's Journey, a play "of old sorrow, written in tears and blood"11 meant to its creator may be guessed at from his wife Carlotta's account of the work's genesis: This night he told me he was going to write a play about his family. It was the thing that haunted him. He was bedeviled into writing it. ... He had to get it out of his system, he had to forgive whatever it was that caused this tragedy between himself and his mother and father. When he started Long Day's Journey into Night it was a most strange experience to watch a man being tortured everyday by his own writing.12 Arguably, many of the playwright's early works, from his first full-length play, the crudely autobiographical Bread and Butter through Beyond the Horizon, All God's Chillun Got Wings, Desire Under the Elms, The Great God Brown, and Mourning Becomes Electra can be seen in retrospect as works of apprenticeship for the profound exploration of the relationship between himself and his parents found in Long Day's Journey into Night. At the heart of both playwrights' obsession with the family is the relation between father and son, although it must be quickly added that for O'Neill the relation between mother and son is at least as significant. The plays of O'Neill and Shepard are filled with images of father figures who are both respected and despised. One of O'Neill's earliest works, the one-act "He" (1917) offers a precursor to Ephraim Cabot of Desire Under the Elms in the Ahab-like whaling man Captain Keeney, whose men are on the verge of mutiny and whose wife (strongly reminiscent of Mary Tyrone) is on the verge of losing her sanity as the play opens. "He just walks up and down like he didn't notice nobody," says one of the sailors on the whaling ship, while another calls him a "hard man-as hard a man as ever sailed the seas."13 Keene/s own words, however, best characterize his monomania: "I don't give a damn 'bout the money, I've got to git the ile!"14 By the time he wrote Long Day's Journey into Night, O'Neill's vision of his father was tempered with the perspective of time and his own father's death. Despite Mary's recriminations concerning Tyrone's drinking, selfishness and parsimony, his confession in the play's harrowing fourth act reveals him as a victim of his own poverty-filled past, rather than as a selfish tyrant: Yes, maybe life overdid the lesson for me, and made a dollar worth too much, and the time came when that mistake ruined my career as a fine actor. I've never admitted this to anyone before, lad, but tonight I'm so heartsick I feel at the end of everything, and what's 52 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism the use of fake pride and pretence. The God-damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success in--a great money success —it ruined me with its promise of an easy fortune. I didn't want to do anything else, and by the time I woke up to the fact Fd become a slave to the damned thing and did try other plays, it was too late. They had identified me with that one part, and didn't want me in anything else. They were right too, I'd lost the great talent I once had through years of easy repetition, never learning a new part, never really working hard.15 If the image of the father in O'Neill tends toward the stern, ambitious patriarch, in Shepard the father is of many types; he may be a figure of elusive mystery, associated with wandering off to the desert as in True West, deserting the family as Shepard's father actually did, an image of fading but still vital masculinity suggested in Shepard's poem "Power" depicting a footrace between father and son: The power in his legs The quickness in mine It almost killed him but he won And afterwards I heard him puke behind the shed That night I went to bed And dreamed of power in a train16 The image of a father who is a scorned rival is present in one of Shepard's earliest plays, The Rock Garden (1964) where an adolescent's tale of his sexual exploits literally knocks his father off his couch.